“Sure. I like Japanese.”
“Can we get some saké? I love saké.”
“Sure.”
“You got any more of those macadamia nut cookies at your house?”
“No, but I have the ingredients to make some more if you’d like.”
“Yeah. I like those cookies.”
“Whatever you want, Orion,” I said, my tone decidedly bored, though my heart felt far lighter than it had all day.
I got the distinct feeling I was being manipulated, and not in a very subtle way. It was an odd contradiction, because on the surface he presented a needy, greedy brat trying to get me to spoil him. But he’d been kind to me today, trying to distract me from my pain, and I thought maybe he still was. I sensed he knew exactly what I needed tonight. I needed someone to take care of. Having received that gut punch by my son, I’d been swimming in hurt and rejection. I longed to nurture someone. It was possible Orion sensed that, and was trying to make me feel needed. And using himself to do so.
And anyway, did it really even count if I knew I was being manipulated? If we both knew? Because Orion wasn’t exactly hiding it. With his demand to spend the night, along with his food and drink and cookie requests, he was testing my boundaries, whatever his motivation. He was seeing how much I’d succumb to. And so far, he’d hit no barriers.
“Whatever you want, Orion.” I’d said those words with a tone of sarcasm, but I feared they were deadly honest, and that scared me a little. Because while this man had appeared in my life as a clown, I suspected he was going to try making me his fool. And I suspected I was going to let him.
Chapter Twelve
“I didn’t know you had a pool. Your back yard is great.”
I set a plate of cookies down on the patio table and took my seat. “Thank you. I did a lot of landscaping and installed the pool when I moved in.”
“You did all this? You’re pretty damn active for an old man.” Smirking, Orion picked up a cookie, then immediately dropped it. “Shit! That’s hot.”
“Instant karma. They just came out of the oven, let them cool a minute.”
“You burned me.” He narrowed his eyes. “On purpose.”
I laughed. The stars were out tonight, clear and appearing extra close in a dark sky, and I felt like they were about to rain down on me. Not in an apocalyptic, end of the world way, just an aesthetically pleasing meteor shower. I was feeling way too good, and laughing way too much.
“I didn’t burn you on purpose,” I said. “You’re just greedy and wanted your cookie right away.”
Orion poured himself another cup of saké. “I’ve never heard a better description of my personality. I’m greedy and I want my cookie right away.”
We’d already eaten our dinner and were relaxing in my back yard, a cacophony of night bugs singing in the woods. I’d lit my tiki lamps and the flames were our only light source aside from the moon and stars, and everything felt soft and…okay, romantic. I’d always thought that word only meant one thing, relating to a certain type of affection, purely sexual.
But I wasn’t feeling sexual at the moment. The lust that usually gripped me whenever Orion was close had faded somewhat into the background, and my emotional state wasn’t centered on any one thing. It was more like a soft, pleasant humming I could feel in everything around me. Like I could drink the air and taste Orion’s laughter and swim around in the beauty of the night.
Something about Orion just made me feel good even when everything in my life was generally shitty. He was funny and strange and kept me on my toes. He challenged me and wasn’t at all afraid to tell me if I was being a dick. But at the same time, he had a genuine warmth to him, an easy compassion, and incredibly good insights.
I was having such a good time, in fact, I’d forgotten why we were together at all, until he suddenly brought it up, speaking through a mouthful of cookie. “So about your father.”
“Oh. Yeah. Jasper. I could write a book about Jasper. It would be a horror story.”
“Don’t be mean.”
“Do you still want to help him out? Doing his errands and so on, like you were before?”
“Yeah, I really do. I hate seeing him like he was today. He needs structure, and when he doesn’t have it, he goes haywire.”
I poured beer into my glass. “What do you mean he needs structure? Like someone to tell him what to do?”
“Okay, it’s like this. Your dad’s always been a really regimented guy. His job, his past, he thrived in it. Getting shit done, fixing things, duty and honor and all that.”
“Yeah. I can vouch for that. Wasn’t easy being raised by him.”
“I bet. But here’s my theory. It was tough for him to retire, because he lost some of that structure. But I think your mom and his marriage and family stuff kept some of that structure in his life, so he didn’t feel the loss of it so hard. But now, his kids are grown and he’s lost his wife, and he’s been flailing. More than a regular person. Because he’s not a regular person. He’s extraordinary.”
I stared back at Orion, processing his words.
“I’m sorry, you probably don’t want me telling you how your own father is. It’s arrogant, right?”
“No.” I took a sip of beer. “You might know him better than I do. And honestly what you’re saying makes sense. I hadn’t thought of it that way.”
“I just figured it out along the way,” he said. “Like that he goes for his swim at the exact same time every morning, down to the minute. But if there’s a bad storm or something and he can’t do his swim, he gets cranky. Then he doesn’t seem to want to do anything all day and will let other shit slide, like showering or paying his bills or cleaning. If one thing is off, it triggers everything else.”
“Right. So how have you been keeping him on track?”
“I started making suggestions about how to manage his time.”
I snorted. “And he listens? He doesn’t listen to me.”
“I know, I have a theory on that, too.”
“Oh yeah? Please enlighten me.”
“I will, but first, I wanna stress something. It’s not that I do all Jasper’s shit for him. He’s really self-sufficient. He just gets a little lost without a map sometimes.”
“All right, so are you his map then?”
“It’s more like…I throw in suggestions and make him feel like it’s his idea too.”
“Ah, okay.” I nodded. “Gotta take his pride into consideration.”
“Right. So I tell him, hey Jaz, we should take an hour every Wednesday and pay these bills. Or I say, let’s clean your place on Fridays so it’s nice for the weekend if you want to invite the guys over. And I found he started repeating it the following week. So we got a routine going. And when he has that routine, he’s calmer.”
“Interesting. But I’ve been dealing with his erratic behavior the past year, so he’s not always on track.”
“True, sometimes things knock him sideways and I just have to like hit the reset button for him.”